Quotes from Robert Turcan

Believe me, the statues brought from Syracuse into our city came as enemies. I hear all too many people deride the terracotta ornaments of Roman gods' (Cato, in Liv., 34, 4

Roman polytheism was opportunistic and thus open in advance to possible expansion. Like the English, who would rather make a new law than abolish an old one, the Romans adopted other gods without rejecting any from the old pantheon.

There was nothing more specifically Roman than domestic worship; it was what immediately distinguished Roman religion, for example on Delos, from the Greek environment, in the case of the colonists who lived on the island.

On the whole, April ritualised femininity, but with somewhat plebeian connotations (Ceres, Flora, the Erycine Venus and probably Virile Fortuna as well).

In any case, many of the rites that became public had in fact originated in the family. A Roman's house was like a temple, and the paterfamilias its hign priest.

Fire was part and parcel of the family Lar, and the hearth was used as an altar to the Penates, the household gods who looked after the store room (penus) or the interior (penitus) of the home where in the past the floor had covered the dead.

The table itself was sacred, like the nuptial bed (lectus genialis) set up in line with the entrance door. The walls, the furniture, the dishes used for daily food as well as for honouring the gods were equally hallowed. Even workaday tools - broom, pestle, axe - had their own familiar demon: Deverra, Pilumnus, Intercidona.

On waking, the Roman's first act was to ponder over his dreams, in case the gods had sent him a warning: 'The human race, doomed to worry, averts the night's presages by a pious offering of flour and crackling salt' (Tib., 3, 4, 10).

The presence of a lararium in the bedroom of emperors (Suet., Aug., 7, 2; Dom., 17, 5; see SHA, AS, 29, 2) suggests that morning prayers were said there.

The Lar was always greeted before crossing the threshold (right foot first), and upon returning home (redire ad Lar em suum). He was invoked before one left on a journey or on campaign

For Columella (11, 1, 19) in the first century ad, it was still important to eat in the presence of the servants before the 'Lar of the master and the family hearth'.

There is epigraphic evidence of a temple of the divi on the Palatine in the second century ad. Even though the reigning emperors had no kinship with the Julio-Claudians or the Flavians, their deified predecessors formed a kind of great ancestral family protecting the imperial house, soon qualified as 'divine'. A sort of heaven-sent and cultic solidarity united the living and the dead, as in the ancient religion of hearth and home.

Even in the fourth century (in the heart of the Christian Empire), the natales of the eighteen deified emperors were celebrated;

Salt was sacred, and sanctified the table. The patella and salinum were the two items that the Roman of the pioneering days held above everything to be the deorum causa (Liv., 26, 36, 6). They were the only two items of tableware that the generals of that time took with them on campaign (Plin., NH, 33, 153).

For to make holes in the earth was to rape it! The Romans had scruples about violating or disfiguring the landscape: their religio had aspects that today we would call 'ecological'. That did not prevent their undertaking large-scale works, but always with the approval of the gods.

Instituted in 212 BC after consulting the oracles of Marcius and the Sibyl, the Apollinarian Games at first took place on only one day (13 July), then three, and finally lasted from the 6 (if not the 5, in the calendar of Philocalus) to 13.

Lamps were not left burning on the table when dinner was over; before going to bed, the mistress of the house - who had a part to play in family priestly duties - saw to it that the house was swept, the lararium and the hearth carefully cleaned.

The presence of lararia in some bedrooms gives reason to suppose that before going to sleep prayers were again offered to the gods. An idol of Fortuna (SHA, AP, 12, 5; S, 23, 5) watched over the sleep of the emperors. In his bedroom, Augustus also had a portrait of his great-grandson as Cupid, on which he would bestow a kiss each night when he entered (Suet., Cal., 7).

On 23 August, small live fish were thrown on to the fire pro se ('to redeem oneself or 'for one's well-being') wrote Varro (LL, 6, 20), 'in place of human souls' says Festus more precisely (p. 276

Around the new mother, three deities mounted guard against the dreaded violence of Silvanus, that 'fierce, terrifying, rough' demon of the woods (Aug., CG, 6, 9, 2): they were Intercidona (for without the blade of the axe one cannot cut trees intercidere); Pilumnus (for without the pestle one cannot make flour), and Deverra (for without the broom one cannot pile up the grain).

We return to climatic concerns with the Volturnalia of 27 August. Volturnus was a devastating wind, 'whirling around on the heights' (Lucr., 5, 745)

September was a corresponding time of relaxation. Its calends were consecrated, rightly and properly, to Juno, but in this instance to the Regina whom Camillus and his juvenes had brought from Veii. Like other foreign deities, this Etruscan Uni was installed on the Aventine (near to the present-day Sta Sabina), as well as a Jupiter of Osco-Umbrian origin whose anniversary was celebrated on the same day, 1 September: a Jupiter Liber or Libertas, god of liberty and not of wine

A 'fast of Ceres', decreed in 191 BC following prodigies, after consulting the Sibylline Books, was supposed to be repeated every five years (Liv., 36, 37, 4), but annually on 4 October in the time of Augustus, in the era and under the probable influence of the Athenian Thesmophoria, on the eve of a day when once again the mundus opened, sometimes known as that 'of Ceres' (Fest., p. 126, 4).

wells were adorned with wreaths, and springs with flowers, for the Fonta - or Fontinalia. On this day a god Fontus or Fons was celebrated (Varr., LL, 6, 22), 'the son-in-law of Volturnus, husband of Juturna' (Arn., 3, 29).